Microsoft offers Windows developers a bridge to Apple iOS

Joab Jackson |
Aug. 7, 2015

Having promised developers to be less Windows-centric and more cross platform friendly, Microsoft has released software that helps programmers more easily bridge the divide between Apple applications and Windows applications.

Having promised developers to be less Windows-centric and more cross platform friendly, Microsoft has released software that helps programmers more easily bridge the divide between Apple applications and Windows applications.

The Windows Bridge for iOS, now available as a preview on GitHub, is designed to make it easy to port applications written for Apple iOS devices so that they run on Microsoft Windows computers.

The library, abbreviated as WinObjC, will also ease the process of developing iOS applications on Windows machines.

"Microsoft's move here illustrates that the only serious way to engage developers today is with open source," noted Al Hilwa, IDC program director for enterprise software development.

"While the project is aimed at converting iOS apps to Windows Universal apps, the full effort is really about appealing to Objective-C developers in general, which is now a sizeable ecosystem," Hilwa wrote in an e-mail.

The Microsoft package includes a compiler, an Objective-C runtime, a library for running iOS application programming interface (API) calls, and a set of tools for integrating WinObjC into the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

Ultimately, the WinObjC library will be included in future editions of Microsoft Visual Studio, according to a technical deep dive offered in a blog post by Salmaan Ahmed, Microsoft program manager for WinObjC.

On Thursday, the company released the newest version of Team Foundation Server, its source code management system for developer teams.

Team Foundation Server 2015 comes with a new build automation system, browser-based code editing capabilities, and support for Kanban board-based development.

The company also announced general availability of the Azure Data Factory, which is a cloud-based data integration service, and Microsoft Identity Manager 2016, a cloud-based access management service.

Also newly released is SQL Server 2016 Community Technical Preview 2.2, which comes with new advances in security policies, as well as fresh data management and reporting services.